Phones have no place in the classroom, the Ontario government says as it announces a sweeping province-wide ban.
The Ontario government announced on the weekend that electronic devices must be silenced and out of sight for the entirety of the school day, starting next year for students from kindergarten through to Grade 6.
Students Grade 7 and up will have more access to their phones throughout the day, with their use only being prohibited during class hours.
If students are caught using their phones, they will have to hand them over to staff and their parents will be notified.
“We have heard loud and clear from parents and teachers alike that cellphones in classrooms are distracting kids from learning,” said Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce in a statement released Sunday.
“When it comes to cell phones, our policy is ‘out of sight and out of mind,’ as we get students back to the basics by restoring focus, safety and common sense back in Ontario schools.”
Social media sites will be banned from all school networks and devices under the new policy as well.
The government will also ban recording and sharing videos or photos of individuals without explicit permission.
However, the policy does not elaborate on how these measures will be monitored or enforced.
Lecce told reporters that the government’s new measure will be left up to teacher’s discretion and that they may decide when and how smartphones will be used in classrooms.
“This is about restoring focus during instructional time,” said Lecce. “Outside of that, during lunch or recess or spares, we’re going to try to treat kids with a sense of personal responsibility.”
Additionally, a section on student’s report cards will be dedicated to grading students’ distraction levels in the classroom.
“While I think it’s certainly a good thing that the government is looking to strengthen their policies on this, they really could have gone quite a bit further,” Paige MacPherson, associate director of education policy at the Fraser Institute told True North.
MacPherson thinks it’s laudable that the Ford government is looking to crack down on smartphone use in the classroom but as far as grading distraction levels on report cards, she feels the effectiveness of this new measure will be too little, too late.
“This is something the parents should be hearing about long before the report card arrives,” she said. “There should be a more consistent environment of parental conversation between schools.”
The Ford government, in 2019, asked individual school boards to come up with their own policies restricting phone use in the classroom to improve educational and mental health standards but MacPherson sees little innovation from that initial failed policy.
“When you get into the details of this policy, it has a lot of the same issues as the previous policy,” she said. “In 2019, they left the specifics up to school boards and at that time the teachers had made it clear in their response that the policies were almost impossible to enforce. So the ban was ultimately thought to be pretty ineffective and the same enforcement issues remain.”
MacPherson suggested that students could hand over their phones upon entering the classroom and, once the lesson is over, teachers can return them.
“Anybody who’s been to a comedy show or a concert that’s being recorded for Netflix has had to put their cell phone in a pouch so they can’t record the material, they can’t post it online, and they also can’t do anything else with their cell phone while they’re at that show,” she said. “As a result people probably enjoy the show a lot more because they are distraction-free. Then, at the end, they’re given their cell phone back.”
According to MacPherson, the research around phone use in the classroom and declining test scores, especially with math, is crystal clear.
“Just having the presence of a smartphone in a kid’s pocket actually serves to distract them enough to impact their cognitive ability and ultimately affect their math scores in particular,” she said. “The research on this is so clear that they really shouldn’t be avoiding it,” she added. “Kids just do not have the brain ability to not be distracted by this.”
Lecce said that the main difference between the 2019 policy and this latest one is that the phone ban in classrooms is now province-wide.
